The answers are at the bottom of this column. Chances are you got them right. The really interesting question is why you got them right.

Since you`ve never seen these syllables before in anything resembling this form, you didn`t check them off against all the real words you know and separate the candidates for nonsense. You therefore must know some general principle that tells you whether any arbitrary sequence of sounds is or is not a well-formed syllable of English.

Just because you cannot say what the rule is doesn`t mean you do not know it. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Morris Halle says- he is the author of this example-people know lots of things without being conscious of the fact.

For example, he writes, ``Major league ball players must surely have knowledge of parabolic trajectories, for each time they catch a ball they must somehow calculate such a trajectory. But no one is likely to conclude that baseball players have explicit knowledge of Newton`s Laws of Motion, that they can solve differential equations or even that they can do simple sums.``

Like the knowledge of parabolic trajectories possessed by ball players, says Halle, knowledge of syllable onsets is largely implicit-but that doesn`t make it any less real.

Welcome to the world of linguistics, where the task shared by an expanding corps of specialists is to scout out those unformulated but knowable laws of language. It`s a world that Halle helped create, not least by hiring Noam Chomsky to teach with him at MIT, then building the world`s best linguistics department around him.

Chomsky is the man who, with the publication of a single set of lecture notes in 1957, transformed the study of language from an old-fashioned habit of collecting and comparing different languages-sometimes looking for an ursprache, a mythic mother tongue from which all languages are descended-to the very cutting edge of cognitive psychology.

That is to say, he demonstrated conclusively, across a broad front, that these regularities in the human language faculty existed, no less than the laws of motion. By asking, how does a mind know a language? How does it acquire its knowledge? Chomsky and Halle and others showed that answers to these questions were rooted in knowable biological facts: the shape of the mouth, the physics of sound, the physiology of the brain, the mechanisms of natural selection, the deep structure of grammar. Linguistics from 1957 on, therefore, has mainly been about elucidating the hidden basis of nature`s hardwiring of one sort or another. And, of course, where hidden order undergirds casually observed surface behavior, usually there is money to be made.

When Jeremy Campbell wrote ``Grammatical Man,`` his brilliant exposition of the revolution in information theory, he steered clear of the MIT linguist to a surprising extent. Social science citation counts show Chomsky to be the most influential psychologist of the 20th Century-well beyond Sigmund Freud.

Yet, Chomsky is still not quite at the center of a field that either has or hasn`t overturned philosophy, having long since conquered a major part of psychology. One reason is his scientific style, a relentless pushing of propositions to their extremes. Another is the protective coloration of Chomsky`s strong personal politics, which are well to the left of those of Fidel Castro. Nothing has changed his lifelong conviction that America is what is wrong with the world.

In contrast, in science, Chomsky has changed his mind three times about crucial issues in structural linguistics, and there are rumors of an impending fourth. This is not especially surprising, for the conversation of science proceeds in a much more orderly fashion than political discourse. As Chomsky says: ``You have to understand more, but maybe know less.``

Linguistics has been racing ahead in recent years, into realms of computer science, cognitive psychology, neuroscience. Today you`re as likely to meet a linguist in an artificial intelligence laboratory as a computer scientist, a cognitive psychologist or a neuroscientist. The point is we are getting a handle on what it means to think-and what it means to adapt computers to the process. Ahead lie dreams like machine translation, object-oriented search (meaning machines that do the reading for you) and